Stepmom Eda and me on the day before the massive fires in October 2003Well damn. I'm gonna have to stop seeing my stepmom in the last part of October. This is the second time I've done this on a nice bright sunny day, only to wake up to news the next day that my whole damned county is on fire! No shit! It happened in 2003, and here we go again. So far today the sky is not as filled with ash as it was four years ago. I also happen to be just a few miles away from there, and at this point, maybe that helps. But we shall see how long that lasts because in 2003 the whole place was overtaken for days. Grrr. At this point, I don't have any fear of the closest fire, which is still about 25 miles out. In 2003, the fires got to about five to seven miles out and that actually got a little scary considering how fast they spread and how they jumped freeways and seemed to be able to work across the vast Miramar air base. I actually began to make ready.

One man who I work for lives about a mile or two from the Rancho Bernardo fire. I hope he is okay. In 2003 Kelli lived up in that area in Poway and she had to evacuate down to my house in Clairemont but had to go north to go west to go south because the logical 15 freeway was in the firestorm. The fire back then came within about a mile from her apartment. Our friend Cindy has a house on the outer reaches of the developed part of Poway. Kelli used to live with her shortly before the fires. In 2003, Cindy also was in the process of becoming a grandmother just as the fires ripped through, and while Cindy was at the hospital with daughter Trinity and new granddaughter Natasha, Kelli and another friend-roommate clandestinely (sort of—the area was closed and she needed to show some evidence she lived there—an envelope with her name and the address did the trick) went and rescued the dogs and gathered pictures for Cindy. Welcome to this world, Natasha.

The sky on the very next day, shot in the exact same position in the yard, facing 90 degrees leftAnd again, here is an illustration of the folly of the way we build across the landscape. Rancho Bernardo and Rancho Penasquitos are giant exurbs that are low density, and sit on the edges of canyons and other wild areas. It was exactly the same in 2003; Poway and Scripps Ranch are neighboring communities. I actually used to deliver meals to seniors up there in all those communities, and the whole exurban build-out was an eyesore and a pain to navigate as a driver. Each of these areas to greater or lesser extent has some faux-forested areas where the houses are meant to seem deployed in the wilds. As Scripps Ranch found out, that was its biggest fault, with explosive eucalyptus trees surrounding houses with wooden roofing. The place had large areas that were decimated. A debate followed about all that and codes were changed so that wooden roofed houses would need to be re-roofed with tile or other fire resistant material.

What else can San Diego expect if we have these exurban tracts which flirt with disaster by design? Maybe people will come to their senses with this second firestorm. But I don't think so. All around, invariably there is a chorus of "We'll just rebuild. We aint going anywhere!" Have it your way, people. It is a recipe for disaster. Do these people need their "space" more than the city needs to be safe? The low density development and twisty roads terminating in cul-de-sacs make it harder to navigate emergency vehicles, and the sheer sprawl of places makes it harder to get control over such fires. Our local canyons and hills make it hard to fight fires when the fire begins to shape the weather itself. Exurban houses are just in the way and are shown no mercy except in seemingly random instances where there will be an occasional house standing among other lots with nothing but destruction.

This is our Katrina; what will we do in the face of it? You think maybe Mother Nature is tapping us on the shoulder a bit more in all these recent disasters? Is Al Gore just making this stuff up? What do we have to gain by repeating the same patterns of building where we should never build?